1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a computer system which is capable of booting multiple operating systems, such as Windows and Linux, and is provided with a plurality of expansion slots.
2. Description of the Related Art
In general, a computer system is provided with a plurality of expansion card slots for I/O function expansion, typically PCI (peripheral Component Interconnect) expansion slots, into which PCI expansion cards are detachably inserted, respectively. Typical examples of PCI expansion cards are a storage card such as SCSI (Small Computer Standard Interface) or Fiber-channel interface and a network card such as FDDI (Fiber Distributed Data Interface) or Ethernet interface.
In most cases, different operating systems support different types of PCT expansion cards. Accordingly, it is necessary for the computer system to boot up an operating system without mounting PCI expansion cards which are not supported by the operating system. If the computer system mounted with such a not-supported PCI expansion card boots up, there is a possibility that some malfunction occurs.
Recently there have been cases where multiple different operating systems selectively boot up on a single computer system. For example, in the case where online transaction processing is performed in the daytime and batch processing at night, the computer system operates while switching back and forth between an operating system suitable for online transaction processing and another operating system suitable for batch processing.
Accordingly, when a conventional computer system operates in the multi-OS (operating system) selective boot condition, an operator must check to see whether the computer system is not mounted with any PCI expansion card that is not supported by a startup operating system and, when mounted, physically remove the not-supported PCI expansion card from the computer system. This task is cumbersome more and more as the scale of a computer system becomes larger, resulting in that human errors are likely to occur and its maintainability and operability are reduced.